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Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Interoperability team is introducing on Friday an open source project to bridge PHP and Microsoft's .Net programming model, Microsoft representatives said.

The company's PHP Toolkit for ADO.Net Data Services uses REST as a bridge between Microsoft's software platform and the popular PHP scripting language, said Peter Galli, Microsoft open source community manager, in a blog entry. With the kit, developed by Persistent Systems, PHP developers can more easily take advantage of ADO.Net Data Services, which are a set of features in the .Net Framework for building and consuming data services from the Web. The services previously were referred to as Project Astoria.

The services "expose a wide range of data sources through a RESTful service interface," Galli said. Full support for ADO.NET Data Services is offered in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 platform.

At design time, the PHP toolkit generates proxy classes based on metadata exposed by ADO.Net Data Services. Developers can call from their code these classes at runtime, for programming against ADO.Net Data Services using local PHP classes.

"Using RESTful services over HTTP, the communication between the PHP application and ADO.Net Data Services is taken care of by the PHP proxy classes and the toolkit libraries, but of course you can look at (or edit) this code," said Claudio Caldato, Senior Program Manager for Microsoft's Interoperability Technical Strategy team, also in a blog.

Funded by Microsoft, the PHP toolkit is available the Microsoft CodePlex site for open source projects. Microsoft also has partnered with PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies to accommodate PHP within the Windows platform.